14 DAY TRIAL // This is a question and a problem that has risen on occasion lately and has now morphed into a complete lawsuit, just who 'owns' Twitter followers, users or their employers, if they're tweeting on behalf of the company?
Twitter is a great way of communicating with customers, so it's obviously being used by many companies as PR avenue, customer support and relations and so on.
Many companies choose to put a face on their accounts so an employee tweets under his or her name, while still representing the company.
But what happens when employees leave the company, taking the Twitter account and followers with them?
At least in one case, lawsuits happen. The Phonedog.com website has now sued a former employee over 17,000 Twitter followers. The company values each follower at $2.50, €1.91 per month, amounting to $340,000, €260,000 over eight months.
Noah Kravitz used to tweet under the name @Phonedog_Noah when he was working for the company. When they parted ways, he kept his Twitter account along with the 17,000 followers it had at the time.
Kravitz says that Phonedog agreed to him keeping the followers, as long as he tweeted about the company from time to time.
However, eight months later, it seems that the company changed its mind and is going to court over the matter.
"The costs and resources invested by Phonedog Media into growing its followers, fans and general brand awareness through social media are substantial and are considered property of Phonedog Media," the company said in a statement.
"We intend to aggressively protect our customer lists and confidential information, intellectual property, trademark and brands," it added.
Kravitz changed the name of the account to @NoahKravitz and added 5,000 more followers since then.
The details of the lawsuit are a bit more complicated, since it seems that other matters drove the company to sue over Twitter followers. But it will be interesting to see how this unfolds and what it means for the many other people and companies in the same position.